Devilry
by Obsidian Blade
Summary: Series of prompt responses. Post-Buu, Vegeta unwittingly wastes a whole bloody day musing about his relationship with that blue-haired harpy.
1. Pride

**DEVILRY**  
>by Obsidian Blade<p>

Hellfire, but the woman could rant for hours.

It was the end of the week, the day Vegeta had begrudgingly surrendered to 'family lunch' half a year before, and they had been eating for most of the afternoon. Roast beef, roast potatoes, roast squash, essentially roast _anything_ his wife could put in the oven without thoroughly burning had been laid out and summarily consumed. Had she shut up throughout? He scoffed as he reached for his glass to wash down a dry mouthful of overcooked cow. What a ridiculous question.

He thought he had learned to tune out her particular frequency when she got like this – and the low burn in his muscles after a week of worthwhile training was soothing enough that he was in the right mindset to let her words part around him without eliciting a response – but there was a particular grate to her voice today that told him he'd probably hear her echoing in his goddamn dreams. It was no surprise the boy had pleaded homework as soon as his stomach was full.

'Vegeta,' she said sharply. Her chair legs screeched against the tile as she stood, and he flicked his gaze over the stacks of empty plates to find her glaring at him with her hands on her hips. 'Just what are you scoffing about, huh? Are my troubles too tiny and pathetic for your majesty to even listen to?'

He snorted. 'I've been listening, don't doubt it. No-one in a thirty mile circumference could _avoid_ listening.'

The grate to her voice was relevant. She could be shrill, she could be piercing, she could be loud and, on the most pleasing of occasions, she could be husky, but it was rare the edge to her voice became quite so jagged. He frowned. He had heard her voice like this before.

'Oh, suck it up,' she said. 'Your ears aren't bleeding; you've got no grounds to complain.'

A typical barb, unusually eroded. She had sounded this way after he'd blown up that damned stadium. He regarded her steadily, polishing off the last of his food and pushing aside his plate. It marked the end of his easy cover for tolerating this time spent with her, and the irritable lines of her brow softened when he made no immediate move to depart. She slumped back into her seat and threw up her hands.

'There's just truth to it, you know, and I hate that.'

'Truth to what?'

She glared. 'You _haven't_ been listening.'

He shrugged one shoulder.

'When we had that big meet-up – the one you _skipped_ – I said Trunks was getting way too big for his boots, and Krillin or someone said he was probably mimicking. And I know they were joking, but the lot of them agreed that I'm _vain. Conceited, _even.'

Vegeta couldn't help it even if he'd wanted to; he barked out laughter. She crossed her arms over her chest, glaring.

'It hurt!'

'You're _hurting_, over _that_? You're the most narcissistic woman on this planet, why the hell would being called as much set you back at all.'

'I am not-'

'Oh yes you are, don't be so pointlessly self-deluding. You said yourself there's truth to it.'

'I said that so you could deny it!'

He laughed again as she seethed in her seat. She might be angry but her tactical error had clearly dawned on her, ushering blood into her cheeks. Trying to elicit the standard human response was always a worthless move. He pushed back his chair, still laughing.

'Woman, you kill me.'

He made three steps toward the door before she grabbed his arm. He didn't break his stride, but half-turned his head to glance back at her, smirking.

'You're not taking me seriously,' she said.

'You've not raised a serious matter.'

He shouldered open the door and walked through, leaving her just enough room to squeeze past alongside him.

'A slur on my character _is _a serious matter.'

'Oh, I see, so I should go beat your friends down for recognising the chief constituent of your personality.' He started up the stairs. Her hand slipped from his arm, and he added as an afterthought, 'Not that the call to violence isn't a pleasing one.'

Perhaps foolishly, he hadn't anticipated her fury, or her hurt.

'You think I'm founded on- on _ego_?'

He stopped halfway to the top and looked back at her. She bristled on the bottom step, fists clenched, blue eyes gleaming forebodingly. For all his building comfort around his little family, his hackles raised at the sight. If she cried, he was walking away, and she could simmer in whatever idiotic broth she was brewing for herself.

Bulma raised her hands and started counting things off on her fingers. 'I am beautiful, I am _blindingly intelligent_, I am tenacious and adventurous and giving – as you bloody well know, mister three-year-freeloader. I am-'

He crossed his arms. 'Listing all your favourite traits to prove you are not vain, if I'm not mistaken.'

Occasionally he would admit to himself that he loved her for her voice, but Vegeta derived immeasurable pleasure from seeing her struck dumb, not least because he knew he was the only one capable of rendering her speechless like this. She flapped her mouth wordlessly as he smirked down at her.

'And what have we here? Bulma Briefs without her pride: the mute, worthless, boring drudge. That's some fine acting, Bulma, practice has really paid off for you.'

'_How could you say that_?'

The hurt was out in full. Vegeta's smirk dropped and his posture straightened, his good humour slipping behind more defensible hauteur.

'I'm not vain; I'm not based on vanity; I'm a good person; do you hear me?'

His distaste flickered at her bizarre obsession with goodness, but he kept that to himself. He eyed her coldly. 'The two are not mutually exclusive, idiot woman.'

'Yes they are! Hello, conceit is a _bad thing_.'

'Is it, now. Then why have you never checked it in yourself? And why in hell's name are you consorting with me?'

She was silent, sullen, thinking, her eyes temporarily trained on the carpet. He frowned. He had no desire to let her come to a self-damning conclusion.

'Pride is strength,' he said. 'Pride is knowing your own damn worth. Your so-called conceit allows you to identify your skills, to capitalise on them. Do you want to be some meek, self-defacing, _modest_ thing that takes no credit for their successes? That sort of pathetic specimen is nothing short of infuriating.'

His expression hardened as she looked up at him, that liquid gleam in her eyes transforming into the familiar flash of intelligence.

'What are you saying, Vegeta?' she said slowly.

She already knew. Her voice had gone through grating, piercing, shrill and loud – and now it had developed that ever-welcome huskiness. Her bursts of emotion always caved as fast as they bubbled up in the first place, and her genius was clearly back in control. He would have been pleased if he hadn't said quite so much a second before.

'That you're a short-sighted, idiot woman who buys into far many of this planet's worthless social constructs,' he said gruffly.

Her head tilted slightly to one side as she ascended the first step. 'I'm a "short-sighted, idiot woman" when I try to disown a quality you love about me, you mean,' she said, drawing nearer.

'I certainly did not say that,' he said, eyes locked on hers as she stopped on the stair below him, one hand reaching up to run her fingers over his forearm.

She gave a lazy, sultry, winner's smile, an arrogant smile, the sort he could hardly resist, and made no move to verbally correct him. Instead, her fingertips traced the lines of his muscles up his arm to his shoulder as she leaned up toward him. His hands went to her hips as her body pressed against his, her lips touching his throat, his jaw, his mouth. Her free hand slipped under his shirt and he guided them down so that she was straddling him as he rested his weight on the steps. She gave the slightest moan as his fingers skimmed the curve of her hip and sank lower. He smirked beneath her kiss.

'See now,' he said against her lips, 'pride has the best rewards.'

* * *

><p>Fanfictiondotnet keeps eating the spaces after italicised words, so I apologise if I've thrown any mutant jumbles of letters into anyone's day. This was produced over the course of a week, with a new chapter topic introduced each day, anyhow, so if the story jumps around a bit... it's because my attempts at editing it into coherency didn't quite go as planned. It may be better to think of it as a series of connected drabbles rather than a proper story, I dunno. Either way, here's hoping it's enjoyable scrawl!<p> 


	2. Wrath

**DEVILRY**  
>by Obsidian Blade<p>

When he had been very young, with the might of his father and the obedience of his people behind him, Vegeta had enjoyed the occasional outburst of anger. The rush of focus and self-righteousness itself compensated for whatever had riled him in the first place, and vindication when he put his enemies down wasn't half bad either.

And then…

'I have to say, you really did take your sweet time with that assignment, Vegeta. Whatever happened to the boy who earned his keep?'

The muted rumble of colossal engines ten decks below drawled through the walls of the ship's bridge and mingled with the hushed voices of the navigation officers as they sheltered behind their consoles. It was rare Vegeta saw this room. Frieza had an audience chamber where he was usually debriefed, and outside of that the boy kept to the pod bays, the medical wing and the barracks.

Today his eyes wandered over the sweeping central gangway, which sloped steadily up from the door to the vast central viewing screen, and the long tables that spread out like smooth wings on either side. Lights flashed over the smaller screens as anxious aliens in battle uniform directed the ship and monitored its functions. He presumed they were equally disconcerted by Frieza's choice to call him here.

'Say something, little monkey, before I lose my patience.'

Reluctantly, the boy redirected his gaze to the black hover chair humming at the centre of the main view screen, then up to the pink, scaly humanoid reclining within it. Frieza's slouch was deceptive; Vegeta had no doubt he was perfectly prepared to kill him on the spot at a moment's notice. The sense of achievement he had found in completing his assignment began to cool at the thought. He sneered.

'I'm not just earning my keep, my lord. I'm making up for every useless slacker on your staff, just like every saiyan is making up for all the weaklings in your army.'

'Every saiyan?' Frieza tilted back his head and cackled, his wine sloshing in his glass. 'All utterly useless, I'm afraid – every last one!'

'Useless?' He scowled vehemently. 'We are the most powerful race around! You should be grateful we listen to you at all!'

And that was the last time his anger rang so pure.

'Mister Zarbon,' said Frieza, silencing a chuckle against the back of his hand, 'acquaint the prince with the truth.'

Zarbon's hand flew out. Growling, Vegeta instinctively stepped back into a defensive stance, but it wasn't a blast or a series of punches that struck him. A salvo of grit and larger fragments of something solid clattered against his chestplate and to the floor. Blinking, confused, the boy looked down. Dust flecked the white tile floor at his feet, punctuated by the sharp, shattered pieces of a green and turquoise disc. The king's medallion.

Vegeta stood stock still as adrenaline surged through his veins. Unused, it boiled in his muscles until it burned. The blood seethed in his head until dark spots spread behind his eyes.

'You see, my dear Vegeta,' said Frieza from his throne, 'bad things happen to people who are willingly insubordinate. Your silly daddy decided to completely reject all my kind hospitality and attack me head-on.'

He did not care about his father. _He did not care about his father._ Barely seeing him, the prince stared through Frieza's blurring outline. The mantra alone held him steady.

'I have to be retrospectively kind, of course,' said the emperor, rolling the last dregs of his wine around in the glass as he considered the dead king's final moments, 'no doubt it was a misdirected outburst. He must have been upset after that great big meteor mashed your monkey homeworld to little bits. That _was_ dreadfully unfortunate, wouldn't you say, Vegeta?'

The bile hit the back of Vegeta's throat before his mind had truly understood the words. He swallowed, stunned, but his stomach seemed to have knotted so tightly there was no place for the stinging liquid to go. It seared his throat.

'Oh, I did _tell _you, didn't I? Your whole planet burst into space dust just the other day while you were off on assignment. I am sorry.'

Vegeta had never heard an apology sound so insincere. His eyes dragged up from the royal debris on the ground to his overlord, saw the pure, self-satisfied evil in Frieza's black lips and red irises. He felt an answering surge of hate. Unthinkingly, he stepped forward to attack.

The crunch of the broken amulet sent black lightning through the haze of red spreading across the prince's vision. He froze, the legacy of his father cracking under his boot. Grief and sheer helplessness joined and distorted his rage into something he couldn't name; something black and searing cold, something that spread and smothered everything inside him until all that remained was the ringing, savage, wild and reckless urge to lash out at something – at anything.

In his hover chair, Frieza smiled. 'I'm glad we feel the same way about that particular trinket.'

His rage had been a worthless, relentless, consuming thing ever since. It surged up when he thought of Frieza; when Nappa and Raditz reminded him of the worthless dregs his race had been reduced to; when the demolition of everything brought tears to his eyes in the dead of night.

The latter habit only lasted a few months after the destruction of Planet Vegeta. Grief itself reminded him of his helplessness. He burnt it out of himself with his fury, the same fury he couldn't possibly discharge at its source for fear of death. It festered; it lost its scalpel edge; it became an indistinguishable part of his bloody, brutal, murderous insanity. It became another monotonous feature of his hateful servitude, and he felt no damned joy in it for decades, until the Dragonballs arose and real revenge became feasible. On Namek, for a short while, his anger had rediscovered its focus. He had finally been able to level it at his oppressor.

And then Frieza was dead, and the executioner hadn't been him, and he was helpless and furious and bereaved all over again, wandering the halls of Capsule Corporation at night with no idea what to do with his pointless life.

'Hey, will you watch where you're going?'

He'd walked right into the blue-haired harpy of the mansion, oblivious even to the impact until her shriek hit his eardrums.

'And you people talk about your so-called "heightened senses."' She was wringing that disgusting liquid out of her sleeve, that foul-smelling _coffee_. Her glare had remarkable fire. 'Jeez, warriors, do you just blindly run onto people's fists too? Are you this clumsy on the battlefield?'

He had been so thoroughly enshrouded in gloom that his usual wit momentarily deserted him.

'What?' he snapped stupidly instead.

'Wow, an oaf in body _and_ mind,' said Bulma with a roll of her eyes.

She reached down to fish her empty mug from the ground. Almost instinctively, Vegeta kicked it out of her reach. She staggered forward as she stretched for it.

'Hey!' she straightened up, hands on hips, and met his glare with one of her own. 'You could at least pick that up.'

He sneered. 'At least? And what else do you expect me to do for you? Should I run you a bath? Fetch your things? Clean your worthless house?'

'That would be a start! You'd still have a long way to go for make up for all this scrounging!' She stepped forward – she _advanced_ on him as though pushing an attack – and prodded him hard in the shoulder. 'And don't call my house worthless! If it's good enough for me, it's good enough for anybody, and I don't see you finding anywhere better!'

If it had been a matter of force, he never would have felt the poke. In fact, it was a matter of impudence and personal space, so he felt it plenty. The slow-burning fire that had been smouldering away, charring his resolve, dissipated and reformed, focused solely on her. He swatted her hand away.

'Of course I can't find anywhere better, this is earth, another clod of mud in the universe's gutter, and every human squat is as deplorable as the next. Your construction is weak, your technology decades behind, and your hospitality no more useful than your shit-for-brains troupe of self-proclaimed warriors.'

He laughed at the way she sucked in breath, drawing herself up with sheer, unmitigated fury in her eyes.

'My technology is state of the art! And our warriors kicked your sorry saiyan butt back to base, so what does that make you, huh?'

He kept laughing. He hated her. He hated everything she was saying, he hated her utter disregard for his rank and his power, he hated the brash world she represented, the one that no-longer recognised him as a threat. But the pulse of fury in his veins was the best thing he had felt since Frieza beat the life from him, so as her eyes flashed and her stream of insults showed no sign of letting up, he simply laughed in her face and rejoiced in the way it urged her anger to new heights.

In retrospect, in providing him with an enemy he could fight, even if each spar was only verbal, Bulma Briefs had kept him from self-destructing before the threat of the androids finally granted him real purpose.

Years on, he said absolutely none of that aloud. Instead, he lifted her from the stairs and carried her to their room, where he laid her on the bed and nipped at her neck with sharp, biting kisses. Her nails dug into his hips as she pulled him down, grinding against him.

'Damn good thing you're not just ego,' he said, his words breaking into a groan as she pulled away his clothes.

She was leading today, and he saw no reason at all to stop her. She pushed him back to undress herself, kicked one leg against the back of his knee and rolled him onto his back. Her mouth pressed down on his. Though he couldn't make out her words, he felt the curve of a question in her lips.

'Would have taken you to pieces,' he gasped as she straddled him. His voice deepened, unusually husky as he amended: 'Good for you that you're a fighter too.'

'Trust me to find the one guy who loves me for my ego and my anger,' said Bulma, before her vocal chords found new priorities, with coherent sentences lagging far, far behind.


	3. Envy

**DEVILRY****  
><strong>by Obsidian Blade

There was a reading chair in the corner of their bedroom, high-backed and upholstered in blue silk. Bulma had settled herself there. She sat tall and regal, one leg tucked beneath her, her arms draped lazily over the high arm rests, her skin completely bare. Sprawled across the end of their bed, Vegeta smirked at the sight of her. She seemed to approve: her back arched a little more; her chin tilted, eyelids lowering; and she gave a haughty grin of her own.

'Well?' she said.

'Well what?'

'I think you should go on with that list. Pride, wrath, what else do you like about me, Vegeta?'

He scoffed. 'Fishing for compliments is beneath you, Bulma.'

Not that it had ever stopped her before.

'Oh, thank you.' She grinned wider and curled a strand of hair around her finger. 'So…?'

He grunted. 'I'm not giving you anything else.'

Frankly, he'd said far too much already. It occurred to him that he was setting a precedent here, a new, post-Buu precedent that she would undoubtedly plaster over the old if he gave her the chance. Apparently the years of goading and compromise hadn't dissipated from her mind just yet, however. She shrugged one naked shoulder.

'I guess it is my turn.'

'I never suggested we take turns,' he said. 'I don't give a damn what you think.'

'Of course,' she said, with a roll of her eyes, 'that's been _blatantly obvious_ all afternoon.' Before he could retort, she pressed on. 'I like your jealousy.'

Vegeta's feet hit the floor heavily as he sat up. 'Just what do you mean by that, woman?'

He saw the realisation flash across her face almost as clearly as he saw Kakarrot the super saiyan three shining in his mind's eye. Perhaps he had admitted to himself that the other saiyan's ridiculous power level was beyond compare, but damned if he was letting anyone else say it, least of all his wife.

'That wasn't what I meant,' she said.

'What then?'

His tone was embarrassingly bitter and he saw her hesitate at the intensity of his gaze. His rage spiked at the sight. She only curbed her sharp retorts when she presumed she had _hurt_ him. The thought that she might see this as some soft spot in need of coddling infuriated him.

'Well, WHAT?'

Her expression hardened. 'Oh, knock it off. Even if I _had_ meant that you coveted Goku's power level or something–' He growled and she glared '–which I _didn't_–'

'I highly doubt that–'

'Then shut up because you're wrong!'

'I'm certainly not _wrong_,' he snarled out through clenched teeth, 'when I say you're an abhorrent, short-sighted idiot with all the allure of a skinned stoat.'

'Oh, fuck you, Vegeta.'

'The only thing you _are_ good at.'

He snatched up his clothes, donned his trousers and thrust his feet into his boots.

'That's bullshit and we both know it.' She stood to match him, but made no move to dress. Her anger reverberated visibly through every sinew of her naked body. 'Envy drives us both to achieve what we don't quite have, it stops us sitting about doing nothing, it keeps you working like mad in that gravity room and damned if I don't like the results.'

She took a step forward to touch him, conciliatory even in her anger, but he batted her hand aside.

'You're parroting what I said about pride, woman, because it is pride and discipline that truly keeps me working, pride and discipline _alone_. There is no one worth envying because there is no one better than me, and more fool you if you think otherwise.'

He strode toward the glass doors leading out onto the balcony. Bulma followed right behind him, so close his knuckles brushed her hip with the natural swing of his arm.

'Fine. That wasn't even what I meant, anyway,' she said. 'I _meant_ I like the way people envy me for having you; envy you for having me. I like the way we turn heads when you actually let me take you places, and I love that instant of jealousy when someone holds your eye for a second, because of the way you shoot them down with a glare and smirk at me like we're sharing some joke: them? Match me?'

In-jokes, wordless comments, heading out _together_: she was the only person he shared that sort of thing with and even she presumed he was enough of a failure to entertain _jealousy_. He halted on the balcony. The cooling air of late afternoon brushed over his knotted brow and bare chest. He looked out over the compound, at the greenery of the gardens and the white peaks of the cityscape beyond. Bulma's hand settled on his shoulder, her fingers curving over the muscles in his neck. He could envisage her expression without turning, a mix of regret, affection and that undeniable irritation with him for disagreeing with her.

'How touching,' he sneered. His ki leapt up around him and he blasted off into the sky without her.

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><p>Dear fanfictiondotnet: prior to me posting this chapter, <em>Devilry<em> had more hits than words. Compared to the hits I get for my other other stories (well under a thousand for my main fic) this is _insane_. I can only presume it is because _Devilry_ is rated M and there is lots of implied sexing.

...Dear fanfictiondotnet: even if I have come to the wrong conclusion, this makes me love you all. I hope everyone is enjoying themselves, the stats have certainly made me grin! :p


	4. Sloth

**DEVILRY**  
>Obsidian Blade<p>

The gravity room didn't block out Vegeta's thoughts. Instead it filed them into the priority system that took over his brain in a combat situation. With the gravity turned up to three hundred times that of earth, irritation with his wife slotted in far behind the need to dodge, block, roll and riposte. Twelve of his most advanced training droids only pushed it further back, back to the furthest recesses of his mind.

Supposedly.

Purple energy lanced toward his shoulder: one of the ki blasts he'd fed the droids. He dodged left, ducked under a bot, sent two of its comrades clattering against the wall with a backhand swipe, and leapt clear over a forth. It pivoted effortlessly in the air, tracking his movements. No sooner had he landed than another blast arched straight toward him. His muscles burned as he forced himself out of the way.

Other humans' envy, what the hell. He sliced clear through a shot with the side of his hand. Blue light burst from his palm as he hurled a replacement ki ball back into the fray. Was this one of those pointless human hunts for affirmation? He somersaulted over the new blast as it ricocheted toward his knees and twisted to bat aside two others, the bots sliding past one another as they kept him surrounded.

No, scenes like Bulma fretting over her ego at dinner were rare. He snagged one of the bots midair and threw it to the ground. It bounced. She was self-assured and besides, he saw no damn reason why she would need external opinion to remind her how worthwhile she was. He chose her, he stayed with her, he was essentially a god on planet earth– he was a fucking god on this pathetic mudball who sure as hell didn't envy _anyone_, let alone Kakarot–

Twelve ki blasts ripped through the air toward him, dicing the space so he had no room to manoeuvre and no way of dodging through the onslaught. One strike caught him in the shoulder. The next smashed into his ankle and sent his right knee crunching into the floor.

His aura exploded into gold. He had no time for this, no patience. Energy roared out of him in one colossal blast wave, shattering first the shots, then the droids and slamming into the walls. The gravity room shuddered at the impact, bolts jumping in their sockets. Then all that was left was the crackle of his aura, the click of the generator powering down and the pitter-patter of smoking parts against the cracked tile floor.

Vegeta let out a long breath and sat down. He should have expected this. His thoughts on the battlefield rarely translated well to peacetime; hell, he had congratulated bloody Kakarrot on his first super saiyan transformation before the dragonballs had teleported him off to earth with the others, and how long had he raged about that subsequently? _You are the best._ It had been a relief to admit when they were caught up in the fight with Buu, but it was proving far more difficult to assimilate now.

He rubbed his eyes. He knew himself well enough to recognise he was best off leaving that to time. It was the only thing proven to slough off his bitterness. Well, time and exposure to his persistent little family.

He grimaced and stood up, scowling as he found himself breathing in the cloud of acrid smoke the bots had kindly belched into the top of the gravity room. Staying in here to suffocate certainly wouldn't help him make up for equating his wife to a skinned stoat. He released the door locking mechanism and headed straight for the shower, where hot water and plenty of soap would hopefully purge the lingering smell of molten metal and burnt paint.

Under the spray, he considered her words anew. Enjoying the envy of others – he supposed that made sense. He had gloated often enough over a felled foe. Unusually, he hadn't considered his pairing with Bulma as some kind of contest, but he wasn't surprised she had. If that was really what she meant, anyway.

He shook his head and turned off the water. The woman spouted all sorts of rubbish. He was happy to let most of it remain completely alien to him; when she was in one of her mother's moods in particular he actively suspected decoding her bizarre behaviour would be a waste of precious brain cells.

What mattered was the knowledge that she didn't rank Kakarrot higher than him in any regard, and he already knew that was true. The last time she had compared them and found Vegeta wanting had been shortly after his sullen return from the Cell Games. He still wasn't sure if mentions of Kakarrot had initially faded from their arguments because each thought of her dead friend brought her grief, but he did know the balance of her affections had shifted dramatically in his favour when he first started training Trunks, and stayed there. That was what mattered.

Dried and dressed, he moved silently into their bedroom, where the light was off and the rumpled sheets cocooned Bulma's sleeping form. He rolled the eyes at the sight of her. No manner of late-night gloom could hide her slobbishness: she slept at an angle, one elbow on the pillows, the other bending over the edge of the mattress. A bunny-eared slipper drooped from one foot thrust out from beneath the tangle of covers she had somehow knotted in her sleep; an empty mug nestled by her side, reeking of coffee; and what looked like a food wrapper of some sort was fisted in her hand.

Vegeta grimaced as he peered closer, inspecting the label. Chocolate he had come to expect, but ham? Bulma's late-night eating habits seemed to get stranger every year. With no small amount of disgust he prised it from her fist and incinerated it, before throwing the coffee mug in the bin and shoving her onto her own side of the bed. She murmured and gargled in her sleep as he worked out the ridiculous twists in the sheets and won a precious corner of the coverlet for himself.

'Vegeta?' she asked muzzily as he lay down beside her.

He snorted, reacquiring his pillow from her disorderly stack of them. 'Expecting anyone else?'

She shook her head blearily and snuggled up beside him, one arm looping around his neck as she pressed a kiss to his temple. Bulma had never been good at waking up, irrespective of the time. Her mind seemed to take a few minutes to reboot.

'Still pissed off?' she said after a short pause. 'Y'know I didn't mean that thing that you thought I meant.'

'I gathered.'

He stared up at the ceiling as she fell silent again at his side. The only sign that she was still awake was the feather-light brush of her eyelashes against his ribs as she blinked in the darkness. This was a typical take on a familiar scenario: winding down while she lounged nearby, lazy as a cat once she reached her bed. It didn't matter how hard she had been working during the day, Bulma gained a sense of utter apathy for the world outside her bedroom once her mind was set on sleeping. He'd found her still snoozing as late as three in the afternoon in the past. What a waste of good hours.

Then again, how many times had her commitment to rest kept him in bed a little while longer? He had been loathe to admit it at the time, but when he was training to fight the androids every minute of sleep had been a blessed relief for his overworked body. The rhythmic inhale-exhale of her breath had soothed him under less strenuous circumstances too.

Vegeta grimaced. This was going too far. Appreciating her pride and her tendency to argue was quite enough. Those were good traits. He was glad she had them. But this, this right here… it honestly seemed like he was praising her for being an utter layabout.

He folded his pillow over his face. It was a bad day indeed when the prince of Saiyans, with all his discipline and his tenacity, caught himself admiring a little human for her bloody sloth.


	5. Lust

Fair warning for y'all: we've reached the inevitable 'lust' prompt response so, er, feel free to skip over this as it does not contain a huge amount of plot. More worryingly, this is my first attempt at writing anything of this nature. It could go either way!

* * *

><p><strong>DEVILRY<strong>  
>by Obsidian Blade<p>

If he had retained any coherent thought whatsoever, Vegeta would have realised Bulma didn't demand an apology as soon as she was fully awake. Even though he had rarely obliged her, she always haggled for a 'sorry' of some sort after their arguments, sometimes verbally, sometimes through week-long moods or pointed glances. Not this time.

She rose from her daze with single-minded intent, however, so coherent thought was gone within the first ten seconds. One moment his pillow was draped over his eyes as he half-heartedly berated himself. The next, his frustration was dissipated by the touch of her warm fingers against his thigh. Her hand moved slowly, feather-light, over the crest of his hip bone, across his stomach, along his chest to his shoulder, where her grip tightened and her nails grazed his back. She pushed aside the pillow and smiled down at him.

If he wasn't there when she settled down for the night, Bulma wore a nightgown to bed. Not one of the silken, lace-trimmed things she would occasionally parade about in when she had a particular purpose in mind. It was a loose, thigh-length tunic in pale blue flannel with three buttons at the neck. The right elbow was threadbare from late nights spent at her desk, working on some new technology.

That night, she didn't lose the nightgown. Vegeta raised himself up and leant back against the headboard, lifting her easily to straddle his lap. The tunic gathered high over her hips, baring her from the navel down. She shivered at the press of the cool air against her skin, and again at his touch. He traced the curve of her belly, the dip of her waist and the arch at the small of her back, where he knotted the cloth around his fingers and pulled it taut over her curves. His free hand undid the buttons at her throat, opening her collar. He kissed the exposed slopes of her breasts, breathing in the scent of her skin and the perfume that infused each fold of her clothing.

She pulled his hair, her fingers guiding his chin as she tilted his head back and lowered her mouth to his. They kissed, the warm, smooth touch of her lips so exhilarating he didn't clock it as a distraction until he felt her weight lift from his waist, her hips dipping expertly to position him at her entrance. She smiled and laughed huskily against his cheek. He couldn't help but smirk back, pure heat in his veins as he let her engulf him.

They rocked together in the dark, slowly at first, kissing and touching, his hands at her hips as he steadied her movements. Then lust took over, need set the pace; she met him stroke for stroke and the contrast between his bronzed muscle and her pale curves was the only thing to suggest they weren't one entity writhing in the bedsheets. Her whimpers turned to moans and his own breath blew audibly across her forehead into her tussled hair. She came first, and he a moment later, because he had no hope in hell of holding out when she bucked against him quite like that.

Afterward, as he held her to his chest, his body curved around hers, her muscles still tremoring against him, he heard her say breathlessly: 'just as soon as I can move. You'd better be ready for round two.'

What an unnecessary warning.


	6. Gluttony

Sick&stupid so I haven't given this my usual once-over before posting because woooords what do they mean? Was edited a lil while ago so should be kaaay though. And I love all you reviewers, yes I do.

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><p><strong>DEVILRY<strong>  
>Obsidian Blade<p>

The high-pitched, high-speed chatter of Trunks' cartoons blathered away through the wall as Bulma and Vegeta sat at the kitchen table. She sipped black coffee; he worked his way through the colossal pile of eggs, bacon, fried toast, sausage, mushrooms, tomatoes, baked beans and pancakes the house bots had cooked up. It was six in the morning, and neither of them had really slept. It didn't bother him, and he doubted she felt any different. It would be an excuse to go back to bed in the afternoon. He looked forward to that.

'Gluttony,' said Bulma from the other side of the table.

Vegeta swiped the last of the bean sauce from one of his plates with a slice of bread and moved on to the next.

'This had better not be the start of another rant,' he said. 'I'd like to sit through a meal without you blathering away about something inconsequential.'

She poked out her tongue at him. 'You eat _mountains_ of food, Vegeta. It's gluttony, pure and simple.'

He eyed her evenly. 'Research your own language, woman. I do not eat _to excess_.'

She watched him clear another plate, a slightly irritating habit she had first demonstrated when she had come pestering him for details about training bots and ki intensity years ago. He should have shut it down then, but by now he was used to the audience. 'By human standards you do.'

'Then it's a good thing I'm not human.'

Her fingers darted out and nabbed a roll of bacon from his plate, steeped with scrambled eggs. 'Yup. If you weren't such a fridge-emptying pig,' she said around a mouthful of his food, 'we never would have started talking.'

'Huh. I would have curbed my appetite if I'd known dodging the bullet was that simple.'

She smacked him on the arm and he smirked.

'Hey, you got to be meaningful yesterday,' she protested.

'Meaningful.' He snorted, deriding the notion, but decided to let it slide. 'You're going to try your hand at that today, eh. Starting when?' He arched a brow.

She scowled. 'If you'd let me get to the point, I already would have. Honestly. I remember the first time we really talked.' She tilted her head to the side as she spoke, and Vegeta had a sneaking suspicion her mother's genes were coming through once again. 'At this table, you shovelling steak down your throat-'

'I did no such thing.'

'Had me fooled,' she quipped back. 'Come on, don't you think there's some significance to it? Our vices drawing us together…'

'Hah! I doubt my _true_ vices did any such thing. You're making this whole damn thing up.'

'Think what you want,' she said. 'I think it's poetic.'

He spluttered over his last bite of breakfast. '_Nothing_ about me is _poetic_, woman!'

Bulma grinned. He stood up. He knew that grin, it was her _I know better_ grin, and it had no place cheering on any statement that tied him to poetry.

'I'm just saying!' she sang, pushing back her chair as well and dancing toward the living room.

'You're _just saying_ absolutely nothing in the least bit true!' he snapped, hot on her heels.

Their son looked up at them as they came through the door. He was sprawled on his front on the floor in front of the television, wearing the vest, shorts and oversized socks he slept in. He scowled, likely at his mother's irritating giggle, Vegeta surmised.

'If you're gonna be in here,' he said, 'you better be quiet. The best show's on in, like, five seconds or something.'

'Impudent wretch,' Vegeta muttered, slouching down onto one of the sofas.

That went for both members of his family: impudent, loud-mouthed wretches. He glowered at the technicolour drivel flashing on the television screen, arms crossed over his chest. Bulma dropped down beside him, one arm snaking across his shoulders, her legs resting over his.

'Poetry,' he spat.

'Oh, come on.' She gave a shrug. 'Bad word choice. Can you fault me for being happy we met properly, even if it was over most of a dead cow and enough salad to supply the homeless shelter for a week?'

'No wonder they're homeless if that's how little they eat,' he grumbled. 'Where are they hoping to grab enough energy to function from? Thin air?'

Bulma kissed his head. 'Yeah, that's right, be a bastard to the less-fortunate_ and _completely derail my train of thought.'

'Yeah,' said Trunks from the floor, squirming around enough to give them both a piercing glare. 'Derail that or whatever – so long as it means you're both gonna SHUT UP in the next three seconds!'

Bulma laughed, Vegeta scoffed, and for a few precious minutes at least, Trunks' cartoon continued uninterrupted.


	7. Greed

**DEVILRY**  
>Obsidian Blade<p>

They hadn't moved from the living room, despite the cartoon hero's asinine antics distending into a three-episode waste of an hour and a half. Thankfully having tuned out all but the most high-pitched of voices from the television, Vegeta stared unseeing through the screen. He had detected a pattern in the previous day's discourse but couldn't yet identify it in solid terms. Slowly he looked over at his wife, who was nestled comfortably against his shoulder looking as dazed as he had. Probably thinking over some new schematic.

'What are you driving at?' he said.

Her blue eyes shifted to look at him. 'Huh?'

Vegeta registered Trunks shooting them a warning glare in his peripheral vision, but pointedly ignored it.

'Envy. Gluttony. Not typical words. What are you driving at?'

'Oh, I noticed a pattern.' She shrugged. 'Figured I'd encourage it.' When he continued to stare at her, she continued, counting on her fingers. 'You like that I'm proud. That I'm angry. Then I made the mistake of adding envy to the list; we made up in the usual way, lust…' She ignored their son's gagging noises at the word. 'And then there you were gorging yourself as usual. Gluttony. That's five of the seven cardinal sins.'

'Cardinal sins,' Vegeta echoed.

'Oh, you know. The seven _deadly_ sins.' She flashed him a brilliant grin. 'The things that send you straight down to hell.'

'The other ones are totally to do with ruining some of the best broadcasting ever,' Trunks grumbled from the floor.

'Actually,' said Bulma, leaning forward to peer down at the boy, 'one of them is laziness and the other is _greed_. Greed as in hey, look who's hogging the box again.'

'Not like you want to watch anything,' said Trunks, plonking his chin on his arms and scowling vehemently.

'How do you know?' his mother demanded. 'Did you ask?'

'I don't need to! If you wanted to watch stuff you'd actually get up in the morning for it, instead of lying around in bed until, like, noon every Sunday.'

'And maybe the thing I want to watch will be extra good because I don't usually see it, did that occur to you, buster?'

The things that would send him straight down to hell. Pride, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony, greed and sloth – the woman would have to cover that last one for him, realistically. Absently, Vegeta watched his wife and son bicker over the television remote. There was that threat of a new, compromising precedent hanging over his head again. He had just spent nearly a day conversing with Bulma, after all, irrespective of his escape to the gravity room, and now he was thinking _emotional_ things.

He scoffed inwardly as Bulma launched herself at the remote, only for Trunks to snag it at super speed and reappear balancing on the back of the far sofa.

'C'mon, Mom, gotta be faster than that,' he goaded.

New precedent. What a load of bullshit. He had been a passionate person all his life: passionate about defeating Frieza, about outdoing Kakarot, about beating down his own limits. There was nothing new about that, even if that intensity was now directed at a family rather than a foe. And as for the other thought rattling around inside his head, the thought that he would happily risk another visit to hell for his proud, temperamental woman and his greedy, bratty son, that was only a reiteration of the past. He had died in their defence against Majin Buu, after all.

'You think that's fair? Do you?'

Somehow Trunks had ended up on the ceiling and Bulma teetered on the mantelpiece. She shook her fist at the boy, who stuck out his tongue in response.

'Well guess what's also fair! Me grounding you for being a little brat, that's what! Give me that remote!'

Vegeta sat back, crossing his arms over his chest, and watched them both. He supposed this covered greed, drinking in the presence of these two idiots he was fortunate enough to share a life with. The corners of his mouth edged upward as Bulma launched herself from the mantelpiece, caught their son by the ankle and collapsed with him onto the far sofa, where her tickling fingers easily won the remote.

'How about _the shopping channel_?' she crowed, standing up on the cushions and taking aim at Trunks' cartoons.

As the boy let out a wailing _noooo,_ Vegeta rose fluidly from his seat, reached over his wife's shoulder and deftly swiped the controls from her hands. Her head whipped around, brows low and mouth twisted in mock-anger at his intervention.

'_You_ can't support _Spongebob_,' she started, only to stop, eyes wide with surprise, as he lowered his head and kissed her.

'Eww.' Trunks made gagging noises in the back of his throat. 'Dad, that's gross.'

He reached for the remote, left dangling from Vegeta's fingertips, but the elder saiyan hoisted it swiftly out of the way.

'Just what do you think you're doing?'

'You're not exactly using it,' Trunks replied, crossing his arms.

Vegeta smirked at the familiar gesture, before switching off the television altogether and crushing the controller in his hands. Trunks' face crumpled in horror.

'None of your bawling, boy,' he said gruffly. He glanced at Bulma, taking in the demanding arch of her brows and the residual flush in her cheeks, then back to his son. 'We're going to the goddamn park.'

Never mind hell. Never mind the ever-growing threat of going _soft_. He was Vegeta, Prince of Saiyans, and nothing could ever keep him from his treasured deadly sins.

_End._

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><p>Ta-da, I can finish things. Thank you to <em>everyone<em> who clicked this fic and read it through to its conclusion. Double triple quadruple thank you to everyone dropped me a review or six, you are all The Best without exception.


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